Day 1 of 1hr meditation

Context:

Naval Ravikanth recommends doing 1hr long meditation every day (atleast for 6o days). He has talked about the benefits of this in his podcast and via his tweets. My friend – Kedar, has always sworn by about the benefits of meditation.

I know both Kedar and Naval are very smart, intelligent people. I know there has to be some real backing to what they are saying. I have seen Kedar doing meditation when there are plenty of reasons not to (like when there are people around, when travelling etc). Always knew there has to be some benefit to doing it. Otherwise these guys will not be doing it.

I have tried meditating. I have always half-assed it. Do it for 10 mins. Do it once in a while etc. I was always put off by the thought of having to do nothing for 1hr. To me it looked like a waste of time. After years of avoiding doing it, I think I am starting to realise that it is not a waste of time.

After years of observing myself, I noticed that I spend more time watching youtube and being distracted than I save by not meditating. Saving time by not meditating is clear to me now was just bad short term optimisation.

Giving it a go:

Previous meditating attempts were based around an app giving guided meditation. For some reason I am not able to connect to the voice. My struggles are different. Naval’s meditation recommendation is – 1hr every day for 60 days. Do nothing. Give your thoughts an audience.

This makes sense. I can vent out my frustrations. Today April 20th is day 1 of the 60 days. I am going to force myself to sit for 1 hr every day for 60 days. After that, if I like it I will continue. If I dont like it, I will give up. No pressure.

Day 1: Setup

Setup is very simple. It consists of 3 things, 1) a chair on the balcony, 2) a stop watch(on phone) 3) a habit tracking app (streak)

Chair on the balcony

Default

Challenges faced

Desire to check time remaining

1hr is a long time to do nothing. 5 mins in, I feel like checking time remaining. Its probably good that I dont know the time remaining, that way I will not feel demotivated by looking at the amount of time remaining.

I keep telling myself. Relax, this is going to take a long time.

Desire to get up and do some action

While letting my thoughts free, somethings I might be thinking of some problem at work. I might think though different solutions and when I feel like one of these solutions might work, I feel like getting up and quickly trying out the solution. Sometimes I feel like taking notes..

I had to keep convincing myself that I am going to do nothing and I am not going to break the 1hr based on whatever I feel like in the short term. I am not going to do short term optimisation. If the solution is that viable, it will come back to be again.

Worry that the stopwatch might not ring (and maybe I will meditate for ever)

This is a weird worry. I have no sense of time. Of course, I know I am not going to meditate for ever, but kept thinking what if the alarm does not go off? What if it is in silent and I over meditate?

I opened my eyes in between once to check time remaining. There was 8 minutes remaining. I was both pleased with myself (I did nothing for 52 mins) and not happy because I could have not done anything for another 8 minutes. The next 8 minutes felt like a long time.

For tomorrow I am going to test the stop watch by testing it before starting the meditation. This way, I can atleast be sure that the alarm will go off in 1 hr.